Christian Quattrociocchi, a 2016 Spanish graduate and now a PhD student in Latin American literature at Johns Hopkins, delivered a paper at the 48th Northeast Modern Language Association Convention (NeMLA) held in Baltimore. His paper, “Creacionismo and Cinematic Techniques in Cagliostro, by Vicente Huidobro”, was part of a panel devoted to Early and Silent Cinema in Latin American Literature (1895-1930), organized and chaired by Chrystian Zegarra.

In April 2017, Professor of Spanish Lourdes Rojas will participate in the 20thFeria Internacional del Libro in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as a guest of the Ministry of Culture. She will give a ponencia magistral on Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo and direct a panel discussion on the “Newest Generation of Women Writers in DR and Latin America.”

In February Professor Marta Pérez Carbonell organized a Saturday trip to New York City with her Intermediate Spanish class (Spanish 202). The itinerary included a visit to the Museo del Barrio, the city’s famed Latino cultural institution, where the class enjoyed a Carnival celebration and viewed the museum’s current art exhibits. The evening included a tapas dinner with Spanish delicacies such as fideuá, gambas al ajillo, pulpo a la gallega and everyone’s favorites–croquetas!—followed by a flamenco show. Reports Professor Pérez Carbonell: “The balmy evening helped us all feel like we really were in Andalucía!”

Amanda Lee has won the prize for her essay “The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century Poetic Imagination.” The essay explores how nineteenth-century French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire theorized dance as a poetic language and attempted to translate danced movement into written poetry. Using ballet reviews, iconography, and literary texts, Lee analyzes the discourse surrounding two of the most famous Romantic ballets, La Sylphide and Giselle. These ballets cast the ballerina as a dancer-poet—a liminal figure who succeeded in mediating different sign systems to create embodied poetry. Lee examines how Baudelaire and Gautier characterized the dancer-poet as otherworldly and androgynous, and viewed her as an analog to the queer Romantic poet. The European Studies First Article prize recognizes the best first articles on European Studies, with one prize awarded to a scholar working in the humanities and another to a scholar working in the social sciences.

In a newly published essay (“A Journey from Death to Life: Spectacular Realism and the “Unamendability” of Reality in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty”), Assistant Professor of Italian Monica Facchini investigates the relationship between the spectacle of contemporary society and the “unamendability” of reality (Ferraris) in Sorrentino’s Academy-Award winning film (2013). The essay has appeared in From Neorealismo to Nuovo realismo: Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema, ed. Loredana Di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

Fernando Plata (second from left) congratulated by Melissa Coley ’79 Vice President of the Alumni Council, Jill Harsin Interim President of Colgate, 2015-2016, and Joe McGrath ’85, P’15, P’20 President of the Alumni Council (left to right).

At the annual Awards Ceremony during Reunion Weekend in June, Fernando Plata, Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures was awarded the 2016 Colgate Alumni Corporation Distinguished Teaching Award, along with Mary Moran, Professor of Anthropology and Africana & Latin American Studies. Established in 1981, this award recognizes, on behalf of all Colgate alumni, outstanding teachers at the university. The award is given to up to two (2) tenured members of the Colgate University faculty who exemplify the qualities possessed by the late Professor David Stern (Political Science).

Professor Pérez-Carbonell’s monograph The Fictional World of Javier Marías (Amsterdam: Brill/Rodopi, 2016) has recently appeared. This work “offers a fresh perspective on the narrative universe of one of Spain’s most distinguished contemporary authors. In order to establish the origin and meaning of uncertainty in his fiction, this book presents interpretations of a range of issues inherent to Marías’ canon, in particular those related to the nature of language. With the relationship between language and uncertainty at its heart, this study considers the use of foreign languages, translation, and the effect of silence through an analysis of Todas las almas (1989), Corazón tan blanco (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) and Tu rostro mañana (2002-2007).”

As reported in the Autumn 2016 Colgate Scene (pp. 34-39), celebrated Colgate alumnus Edgardo Miranda-Rodríguez (’93), creator of Afro-Latin superheroine La Borinqueña, notes the influence of classwork done at Colgate. The Scene piece reads: “‘Colgate gave me the opportunity to expand my awareness and knowledge of my own culture,’ he said. He gained a better understanding of Latin America’s history and became fluent in Spanish thanks to the prodding of Professor Lourdes Rojas-Paiewonsky. ‘Studying under her helped me to become the bilingual orator that I am today’—a boon for doing recent media interviews in both languages…”